I've hear (haven't tried personally) that if you soak a kitchen towel really well in cold water and wrap it around the cake pan it will help the cake bake more evenly and keep it from getting a hump in the center.

I have the strips and I don't even use them. I just spray and flower nail with Pam and put it (upside down) in the center of the cake and bake. If you are doing a big cake (16" square) you would use 2 nails.

I guess it could pose a fire hazard....but when I was growing up my mom had a cake business out of our home and she always used homemade cake strips. It looked to me just like strips of old towels soaked and pinned in place. They were all very brown from years of use, but we never started any fires!

Yeah, I just use regular kitchen towels. The ones I use are like utility towels, a coarse weave, not like a bath towel. Don't know if it matters, though. I wet them and wring them out and fold them lengthwise and hold them together with a binder clip. It really seems to help, especially with my chocolate cakes which used to bake up with a high dome. Now my cakes are pretty level. I rarely have to level them. Sometimes I will take them off when it's near the end of baking time and they are dried out. Mine are kinda brown now, too!

No, no, no....Any time there is cloth, whether paper towel or regular towels, exposed openly, there is a chance they may catch on fire.

To make your own, you use wet paper towels, ring out the excess water, fold up and wrap in aluminum foil strips, so the paper towels are not exposed at all. Then just pin your aluminum foil strips around the cake pan. Pin more together if you need longer strips.